Chp 5 The Face of Blackness (preferred: “The Lived Experience of the Black”)

Chp 6 The Negro and Psychopathology

Chp 7 The Negro and Recognition

Chp 8 By Way of Conclusion

Intro

8 “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon … or too late.”

9 “the black is not a man” / negation, consciousness, cosmos, yes /

9 “the black is a black man … rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated”

[AC: the problem is not that the black is black, but the black is a man-notman]

9 “I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself”

10 “Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the qual value of the intellect. / How do we extricate ourselves?”

11 epidermalization

12 “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the stand-[13]point of time.”

13 “And this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence. In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducible to my time.”

13 “… I consider the present in terms of something to be exceeded.”

14 “… what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact.”

14 “The educated Negro, slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth, feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. … Then he congratulates himself on this, and enlarging the difference, the incomprehension, the disharmony, he finds in them the meaning of his humanity. Or more rarely he wants to belong to his people. And it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss. We shall see that this attitude, so heroically absolute, renounces the present and the future in the name of a mystical past.”

An interview with Alexander R. Galloway about my recent book Dark Deleuze has been published at boundary 2 online. In it, we discuss Deleuze and Guattari, technology, queer feminism, blackness, intolerance, and many other topics.

Transcript of a talk I gave December 10th, 2011, as part of an Occupy event entitled “Economics Justice, Economic Resistance.”

I. OCCUPY

I want to begin with two stories from the first weeks of the Occupy protests in New York City.

Think first of CNN’s Erin Burnett, who, in her segment “Seriously?!”, which covered Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park downtown, asked the question, “What are they protesting?” What did she decide? That “nobody seems to know.”

Or, to use our favorite whipping boy, Fox News, look to the outtakes from their show “On the Record.” The Occupy interviewee, dogged with the question of how he wants the protests to “end,” artfully finds ways to refuse the question. His response? “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation to continue.”

By now, I’m sure we have each come up with our own way to respond to this feigned ignorance. Some try to add to the seemingly endless list of demands. Others gesture to the Trotskyite desire for a permanent revolution. Even others try to simplify things down to a few key points.

People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. Continue reading “lepidopteric history”→